The permeating heat, combined with Teddy's lifetime struggle with asthma, often felt like a prizefighter's right-handed roundhouse to his fifty-four-year-old gut. And to make matters worse--and verified by personal accounts offered by the experienced Brazilian officers--his misery would only worsen as they descended into the heart of the Amazon's sweltering jungle. Theodore Roosevelt possessed a keen sense of own body's steady decline with his advancing age, and he inwardly bemoaned the lessening of his usual copious vitality. If only I could recapture just a sliver of youth, he pondered. If only I could gather enough strength to reclaim some of my former vigor, before all is lost on this most inhospitable continent. Yet